Following on the heels of last year’s blockbuster Term, the Supreme Court recently concluded another of equal consequence. But even as the Court grappled with contentious issues ranging from birthright citizenship to the process owed deportees, it also issued significant rulings on matters pertinent to the business community. In particular, the Court continued its recent trend of shaping commercial law through precise statutory interpretation and implementing of checks on the scope and power of the administrative state. Its rulings conveyed that, at least across the business and regulatory landscape, interpretative restraint will continue to guide the Court’s decision-making.
Below, we summarize the key business decisions from this Term and note important cases on the Court’s business docket to watch in the coming Term.
1. Mass Torts. In Medical Marijuana, Inc. v. Horn, a five-Justice majority held that plaintiffs may seek treble damages under the federal civil RICO statute where personal injuries result in business or property loss. Justice Barrett’s majority opinion relied on a close, textual analysis of the RICO statute to conclude that its text does not foreclose recovery for such injuries, resolving a widening circuit split. The Court’s ruling might presage further expansion of the use of civil RICO, incentivizing plaintiffs to convert state law personal injury claims that have any associated business or property loss into federal civil RICO claims with the potential for treble damages. Although plaintiffs must still satisfy RICO’s other requirements (including alleging a direct, causal relation between the injury and racketeering conduct and demonstrating a “pattern” of such conduct), the products liability bar may be drawn to the optics of bringing a civil RICO action, as well as the perceived settlement value of its treble-damages relief.
2. Employment Law. The Court continued its recent project of clarifying principles of antidiscrimination law in the employment context, this Term considering ‘reverse-discrimination’ in the workplace. Writing for a unanimous Court in Ames v. Ohio Department of Youth Services, Justice Jackson found that a plaintiff belonging to a majority group and alleging employment discrimination under Title VII cannot be required to satisfy a different, higher evidentiary standard than what a minority plaintiff must satisfy. Employers should anticipate heightened risks from majority-group plaintiffs filing claims under Title VII, including by those challenging DEI initiatives as unlawful discrimination. Overall, the decision underscores the importance of undertaking fresh reviews of antidiscrimination policies and programs to ensure compliance with the Court’s recent holdings in this area.
The Court’s jurisprudence in other areas of employment law proved a mixed bag for employers, despite perceptions of the Court as favorable to business interests. Some decisions were wins for employers, including Stanley v. City of Sanford, Florida, which limited the availability of ADA discrimination protections for certain retirees, and E.M.D. Sales v. Carrera, which rejected a heightened evidentiary standard for employers to prove that employees are exempt from minimum-wage and overtime-pay provisions of the FLSA. On the other side of the ledger, a unanimous Court held in Cunningham v. Cornell University that a plaintiff can state a claim under an ERISA provision that bars a plan fiduciary from knowingly causing a plan to engage in certain disallowed transactions simply by pleading a violation of that provision. The Cunningham ruling will almost certainly increase the number of these types of ERISA claims surviving the motion to dismiss stage. And it serves as a reminder that, as with Horn, the Court will hew to statutory text and structure, even where the result may burden businesses with protracted litigation and the expense of discovery.
3. Administrative Law and Adjudication. This Term, the Court largely—but not uniformly—continued its recent pattern of scrutinizing and limiting agency authority, through decisions focused on the availability of both judicial review and deference.
Most notably, the Court produced a pair of 7-2 decisions expanding businesses’ ability to challenge federal agency regulation. In Diamond Alternative Energy LLC v. Environmental Protection Agency, the Court held that fuel producers have Article III standing to challenge the EPA’s approval of California regulations requiring automakers to manufacture more electric vehicles. Writing for the Court, Justice Kavanaugh found that a stakeholder indirectly affected by a federal regulation may satisfy the redressability component of Article III standing by establishing that “commonsense” economic inferences about market realities render it sufficiently likely that invalidating such a regulation would redress its injury. Similarly, in Food and Drug Administration v. R.J. Reynolds Vapor Co., the Court permitted tobacco retailers to seek judicial review of an FDA order denying an e-cigarette manufacturer’s application to continue marketing its products. In reaching that result, Justice Barrett’s opinion for the majority applied a broad reading to statutory language in the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act that grants standing to “any person adversely affected” by such orders, extending prior decisions that permitted suits by litigants even “arguably within the zone of interests” to be protected. Although the cases concern different statutes, each demonstrates the Court’s receptiveness to arguments for increasing pathways for affected businesses to challenge agency regulation and decision-making and fits comfortably within the Court’s recent jurisprudence seeking to rein in the administrative state.
This Term was also the first since the Court’s decision in Loper Bright, which overruled the Chevrondoctrine requiring judicial deference to administrative rulemaking. In a 6‑3 decision authored by Justice Kavanaugh, McLaughlin Chiropractic Ass’n, Inc. v. McKesson Corp., the Court looked to Loper Bright in holding that the Hobbs Act, which provides for pre-enforcement judicial review of the final orders of a number of federal agencies, does not bind district courts in subsequent civil enforcement proceedings to an agency’s interpretation of a statute. Although the Hobbs Act is silent as to judicial review of subsequent enforcement proceedings, the Court concluded that, by default and absent statutory language precluding judicial review, courts must independently determine the meaning of the legislative text. The Court also relied on Loper Bright in other decisions considering agency interpretive authority, including City and County of San Francisco v. Environmental Protection Agency.
The Court continued to preserve long-standing judicial deference to agencies’ exercise of discretion granted by statutes, however. In Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, a five-Justice majority concluded that the D.C. Circuit had not afforded sufficient deference to an agency’s application of NEPA, a statute that requires agencies to prepare environmental impact statements before approval of certain federal projects. Writing for the Court, Justice Kavanaugh reasoned that where agencies have been afforded discretion by Congress, courts must “afford substantial deference and should not micromanage those agency choices so long as they fall within a broad zone of reasonableness.” Practically, this means lower courts will be less likely to scrutinize NEPA challenges, which may hasten approvals of federal government projects that might otherwise be hampered by such litigation.
4. White Collar. The Term also brought two lopsided decisions clarifying issues of criminal statutory interpretation.
In Kousisis v. United States, the Court resolved a deep and long-standing Circuit split, confirming that the federal wire fraud statute applies even when a fraudster does not seek to cause net economic loss to the victim. In rejecting economic loss as a touchstone under the statute, the Court held that materiality should instead be used to distinguish workaday misstatements from ones that fall within the statute’s sweep. Because the Court declined to clarify what materiality standard should govern wire fraud in future cases, the precise impact of the decision remains to be seen. However, for now, Kousisis signifies that companies may be subject to prosecution for federal wire fraud where they are found to have obtained property through materially false statements, regardless of whether the victim suffered pecuniary harm.
Conversely, in Thompson v. United States, the Court clarified that 18 U.S.C. § 1014, which prohibits knowingly making a “false statement” to a lending institution, does not prohibit statements that are technically true but otherwise “misleading.” Although the unanimous decision governs only the statute at issue, the Court’s narrow interpretation of “false” may well spur additional challenges to like statutes, constraining the government’s ability to bring cases premised on omissions.
5. Government Regulation. In TikTok, Inc. v. Garland, the Court, in a per curiam opinion, rejected a First Amendment challenge to the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, which requires Chinese-owned TikTok to cease U.S. operations unless it divested. Assuming, without deciding, that the statute implicated constitutional protections on speech, the Court held that its content-neutral justification for burdening speech—national security concerns implicated by user data collection—was sufficiently tailored to survive the intermediate scrutiny triggered by what the Court determined to be a facially content-neutral law. The Court cautioned that its analysis should be “understood to be narrowly focused” to the circumstances of the case. Even so, the decision underscores that foreign-controlled entities may be subject to intensifying scrutiny in coming years with respect to compliance and data security, a dynamic that may also implicate U.S. businesses with significant cross-border operations, investments, or relationships.
6. Judicial Power. In perhaps its most consequential and controversial decision this Term, the Court in Trump v. CASA, Inc., held that federal courts lacked statutory authority to issue universal injunctions, constraining the power of the federal judiciary to provide equitable relief beyond the parties litigating before it. The Court’s 6-3 decision means that businesses will generally no longer be able to rely on the injunctive relief won by other litigants to shield them from executive action. However, other procedures remain available for companies seeking broad, nationwide relief. As the Court acknowledged, its decision does not constrain the ability of parties to seek a preliminary injunction for a nationwide class of those similarly situated, nor to seek universal vacatur of an agency rule under administrative law. It remains to be seen whether these avenues are effective, or prove more cumbersome and less efficient.
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Just as important as the cases the Court resolved this Term were the cases it turned away or dismissed, including some potentially influential securities law cases.
Dismissals of Cases as Improvidently Granted. This Term, the Supreme Court dismissed three cases as improvidently granted, including two securities cases that had been keenly anticipated by the business community. In Facebook v. Amalgamated Bank, the Court had agreed to take up whether risk-factor disclosures in annual SEC filings must also identify whether disclosed risks had previously materialized, even where the past event presents no known risk of ongoing or future business harm. Similarly, in NVIDIA Corp. v. Ohman, the Court was set to review whether stockholders could plead fraud through reliance on expert opinion, and the particularity with which stockholders seeking to allege scienter must plead the contents of internal company documents, potentially tightening pleading standards in securities litigation. The dismissals left in place plaintiff-friendly rulings by the Ninth Circuit, as well as the need for clarification of the governing pleading standards in these respects. The Court also dismissed as improvidently granted the writ of certiorari in Laboratory Corporation of America Holdings v. Davis, a class action case that could have resolved whether classes may include members who suffered no Article III injury.
Although the Court did not elaborate on its decisions to dismiss these cases, such dismissals are typically motivated by a concern that the case does not adequately tee up the question the Court agreed to resolve.
Denials of Certiorari. Despite their potential significance, the Court also denied certiorari in several important cases, including two cases challenging the scope of executive agency authority. First, the Court declined to clarify the scope of the SEC’s disgorgement powers in Navellier & Associates, Inc. v. SEC. The Court’s denial leaves intact the First Circuit’s ruling permitting the SEC to require disgorgement of fraudulently obtained profits without proof of pecuniary harm. Second, the Court denied certiorari in Alpine Securities v. FINRA, declining to hear a constitutional challenge to FINRA’s authority, based in part on a re-invocation of the long-dormant nondelegation doctrine, which limits Congress’s power to delegate discretionary power to the Executive Branch. This leaves FINRA’s authority undisturbed for the moment, though the Court may have been persuaded by the government’s position that it would be premature to grant certiorari given the posture of the case and that proceedings in the underlying case are ongoing.
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The Court has already granted certiorari in several cases to be decided during the upcoming October Term 2025 with potentially important implications for commercial litigation and the business community.
Chevron USA Inc. v. Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana will address the circumstances under which companies performing work pursuant to federal contracts may remove lawsuits to federal court under the federal-officer removal statute, raising questions about businesses’ access to federal courts. FS Credit Opportunities Corp. v. Saba Capital Master Fund, Ltd. raises the question whether Section 47(b) of the Investment Company Act creates an implied private right of action or if sole enforcement authority rests with the SEC. And Cox Communications, Inc. v. Sony Music Entertainment may clarify the standards under which internet service providers may be secondarily liable for the copyright infringement of their subscribers.
This post comes to us from Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Latz. It is based on the firm’s memorandum, “The Supreme Court’s Business Docket: October Term 2024 in Review,” dated July 17, 2025.